[jira] [Commented] (JAMES-2335) Modernize James configuration

["David Leangen (Jira)" <se...@james.apache.org>]

    [ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/JAMES-2335?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=17139330#comment-17139330 ] 

David Leangen commented on JAMES-2335:
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Have you ever thought about using OSGi? It seems to be that James is exactly the type of system that could benefit from it. OSGi provides great configuration support, so it would easily solve this problem. It would solve so many other issues as well regarding product wiring etc. and would really help to clean up the code base since it helps to enforce good practices.

To transition to OSGi, there is a Guice adaptor available.

> Modernize James configuration
> -----------------------------
>
>                 Key: JAMES-2335
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/JAMES-2335
>             Project: James Server
>          Issue Type: Improvement
>          Components: configuration
>            Reporter: Benoit Tellier
>            Priority: Major
>              Labels: feature, refactoring
>
> Apache James currently relies on commons-configuration, and thus on XML configuration files.
> As such the configuration process has several problems:
>  - Working with XML is boiler plate
>  - Working with file leads to a real lack of flexibility.
>       - For instance, in a cluster environment, we would like all the James server to share the same configurations.
>       - Also, in tests, we need to test the different configuration values. We can not do this without overwriting files, which is dangerous, and boilerplate.
> What we need is:
>  - To represent all possible configuration via java objects.
>  - Configuration providers should be able to convert the configuration stored into the java configuration object.
>  - We should be able to inject different configuration providers from guice/spring.
> It would allow to specify alternative configuration backends (different formats, different storage techniques) and allow direct injection (for tests for instance).
> Here would be the steps for this work:
>  - Add a *Initializable* class in *lifecycle-api*. This should be called by Guice and Sprint at initialization
>  - *configure* in Configurable will save a Java object (parse the HierachicalConfiguration into a java object representing it's content). Initialization will then be done by *Initializable*.
>  - Then we can move away, object by object, from the *Configurable* interface: We need to move the configuration parsing in a separated class (behind an interface). We can register *ConfigurationProviders*, with an XML/commons-configuration  default implementation.
>  - Deprecate *Configurable*.
>  - Provide alternative configuration providers, for example, a Cassandra stored configuration provider



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